The Bad Wife Handbook

If in these modern times women had to hide potentially influential books from their husbands and others around them, The Bad Wife Handbook would be included among the silent list traded through some secret alley passage. Imagine pages of poetry and short prose ripped out then stuck inside of the bible so as not to draw attention or suspicion.

The Bad Wife Handbook is full of poetry that trips into the wholeness of married life - through the difficulties of monogamy, writing, children, and all the compromises made along the way. The poems express both emotional success and emotional repression bled out through words and ideas, like the sea and the universe. It is the honest truth of the bad against the good in life - or sometimes the other way around.

The collection, hidden in a pale blue book with a photographed of a wrinkled index card on its cover, tells us that marriage is impossible - the husband a beautiful creature you can’t, and sometimes don’t want to, escape. Children are desperate life drainers who use and take, yet are and always will be the best things ever produced from your body or mind. It journeys through sadness, love, and all that could happen in between.

I can’t say I would recommend this book to every woman I know. It may scare them off to one of the lesbian clubs that a good chunk of my friends already frequent. I can say that any woman in a long-term, committed, heterosexual relationship should read Rachel Zucker’s words. Knowing that her feelings are shared by others makes a girl realize that no matter how alone the compromises can make you feel, you are never really alone, and sometimes, giving in can make you the happiest you will ever need to be.

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